Mutual Coupling Reduction Using Ground Stub and EBG in a Compact Wideband MIMO-Antenna

This paper presents a compact, uni-planer wide band Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna. The designed antenna array has a compact size of (26mm x 31mm) covering a wide frequency band from 3.1GHz - 11GHz. A partial ground plane shared by two radiating patches is used. A ground stub and a single column Electromagnetic Bandgap (EBG) structure in between the two radiating patches results in very low mutual coupling in the designed antenna. The proposed MIMO-antenna was evaluated through different performance metric indicators like channel capacity loss, far-field radiation pattern, S-parameters, envelope correlation coefficient, peak gain, diversity-gain and radiation efficiency. Our designed MIMO antenna has a very high isolation amongst the MIMO antennas (S₂₁ < -25dB), a high Diversity-Gain (DG$>9.995$dB), a very low Envelope Co-relation Coefficient of (ECC < 0.001) and low Channel-Capacity-Loss (CCL < 0.1bits/s/Hz). The said antenna has an average radiation efficiency of 85.5% and a peak gain of (5.67dB) within the ultra-wideband (UWB) spectrum. A 0.8mm thick FR-4 substrate is used to fabricate the MIMO-antenna and tested in an anechoic chamber. The measured results closely match with the simulated results.